Chapter Text
Rain laden with ashes is slashing down in torrents now, but even with the residue already clinging to the fibers of her cloak, even when her boots feel half-full with water, she has to stop.
No one can resist staring at their own wanted poster. Amazing more wanted people haven’t been caught that way.
Three rectangular holos sit mounted proudly on the wall, three varying likenesses of a small young woman rotating within the frames. Three different species. Three different outfits. Three different neutral expressions. Topped with three different adornments upon their heads - Twi’lek lekku, braided human hair, and - urgh, eye stalks of all things -
These are the only parts of the holos that flash a blazing, attention-snatching red. The color seems to slide through her, down her throat, prickling her arms, settling heavy in her gut, and she pulls her hood closer around her face, better hiding the wide white stripes adorning her skin. Her vibrant montrals crowd themselves under the fabric.
A heartfelt sigh just to her right makes her whirl; a dark shape is lounging against the wall, arms crossed. “They just can’t get your nose right.”
“I think my nose is the least of my worries.” She purses her lips shut tight as soon as the words leave her - he mustn’t be encouraged. And the rain won’t have drowned them out, not for him.
Amused golden eyes slit open in the shadow of a low-hanging hood. “Come now, Miss. The only one allowed to catch you is me.”
She blinks, and he has already vanished.
He’s got a lot of guts, thinking any of his theatrics could work on her.
Things began like this:
Shirayuki, bent over a human stricken with a sweating fever, her hand delicately holding the med droid - shaky in midair, in need of new parts that are cripplingly low in supply - in place as it scans the boy’s vital signs. His mother hovering close, hands over her mouth to trap her worries soundlessly against her palms. No more ordinary setting could have been chosen.
And then -
A feeling like Shirayuki has never truly lived in her own skin before. Like she has never seen with her eyes. Her focus is plucked out of her hands - and driven to such heights, the world plunging into stark reality all around her, and a once-empty corner of her wants to weep at the glory of the feeling, like she’s grounded but soaring all at once, like her mind has finally, finally cauterized a wound she had never known she had, she is at last -
A Sith Lord’s apprentice, bare to the waist and stupefied, a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. Standing in the middle of an underground Resistance bunker. (Which had run out of toothbrushes last week.)
Their eyes have already met before they fully realize the other is there.
Just like that.
Their twin, equally-pitched screams probably sew a wormhole into the cosmos. The patient and his mother scream. Shirayuki, riding some wild instinct to its bitter end, sort of hurls the med droid, and it screeches and squawks straight into -
Nothing.
“Miss Shirayuki?”
It bashes into the opposite wall, twittering, finicky parts whirring. The room is once again devoid of Sith Lord apprentices.
Just like that.
The last time she’d seen him, he’d been fully clothed, for one. Lightyears away from this bunker, for another. And not to mention utterly devoid of any method of getting into the very heart of said bunker without being seen by about a thousand people, and getting his toothbrushing done besides.
He had not really been there. And she can’t tell a soul.
The second time it happens, the connection slots open with even less warning than the first time. That back compartment to her brain relents again without her consent, and she braces herself.
From across a dozen star systems, he flashes a wide grin next to her medicine cabinet. “Seriously - you?”
The urge to run is burning in her legs, but she clenches her fists instead. “Stop this.”
It’s the only thing she can think of to say. The only thing that matters, that hasn’t already been said between them. His eyes flare gold and she frantically throws up walls in her mind, thinks of nothing, absolutely does not think about -
His grin fades. “It’s not me.”
The next day, she packs what she can carry. She sees to patients. A burn and a sprained ankle heal so miraculously, so easily under her touch, no hinky med droid required. A galaxy’s worth of ecosystems to choose from, after all, and even the simplest herbalist can therefore come across the most amazing things.
That night, she clutches her astromech droid with one arm because sometimes, when no one’s around to watch, you just have to hold on to something - but she doesn’t take her eyes off the viewport as she flees the Resistance, her last sanctuary, as she presses her ship’s hyperdrive with a shaking hand, and in moments, all she sees is starlines.
Three wanted posters, she muses. All three are obviously Republic-issue, but it holds up under such convenient symbolism in her head.
One for the Republic (whatever that means anymore). One for the Resistance. And one for a Sith Lord.
The apprentice is somehow in her head, and he is going to be a problem.
Her ship is a 4R3 Light Assault Transport, a weapon disguised as a modest freighter. Of course Shirayuki has never engaged the retractable blaster cannons, and she never will. Not just because she wouldn’t, not ever, the very thought of such destruction sets her stomach to rolling with nausea - but because she’s certain that a single concussion of one blaster bolt will shake the entire rusting contraption to debris.
The Unrepentant, it’s called. A smuggler’s vessel. She still blushes looking at it sometimes, at the thought. But it had been the ship that had slipped her from her slaver’s grasp. The ship that had carried her, almost literally, into the arms of her senator.
This is what he would’ve wanted for you. She won’t think of Zen now.
Beside the pilot’s chair, her astromech droid beeps sullenly, the rotating disks in his round torso letting him drift gracefully from side to side like a person impatient on his feet.
Shirayuki smiles shakily. She’s always had a soft spot for droids. “I’m flying perfectly straight, R-U. Just like you showed me.”
Another series of low, serious beeps.
She giggles, ignoring her own sweaty palms around the controls. “Stop being so nervous. You’re a great teacher.”
And then friction - the sound of it, leather gliding over tough fabric - rasps across the top of her seat. Pressure from the vibrating touch shivers its way from one shoulder blade to the other, and she shudders.
“You and a droid against the galaxy, Miss.” That voice of his is so curious today, treading so lightly, she nearly forgets to throw up all her shields. “Now, where are you off to?”
Before all of - all of this - it was as though they were completely and utterly destined to be forever in each other’s way. Battlefields - Hello again, Little Miss, a cheerful wave as he sends Republic soldiers flying with a flick of his wrist, an answering scowl from her. The darkest corners of the dustiest planets - Still causing us trouble, I see, she’d remark, and he’d purr back from the adobe rooftops, You attracted all the trouble yourself, this time.
Months of that - before the last battle. Before he’d saved her life, and she’d gone underground. The Resistance bunker was perhaps the only safe place where he couldn’t reach her.
(And where she couldn’t reach him.)
Shirayuki allows herself one moment for her nerves to cool into steel, and then she swivels the pilot’s chair around. The apprentice steps back, cautious, before their knees can ghost clean through one another.
She meets his wary eyes, and she feels, for the first time, an intoxicating sense of power over the man in front of her. “Let’s make a deal.”
The Unrepentant drifts just far enough past a rose-colored gas giant that its star bursts in an explosion of light beyond its edge, striking the side of the apprentice’s face with its brilliant glow. He blinks, then leans close, one hand reaching out as though to grasp the rim of her chair, looming over her. “Careful,” he says, and there is actual steel in his voice for once. “A trick’s no way to start a friendship.”
“I wouldn’t trick you.”
His hand pauses in midair, as though she’d stopped its progress with her own. The leathered fingers hover uncertainly near her bicep.
She takes a deep breath, and feels his mind ghost against hers.
His lips twitch in the light, short lashes casting long shadows. “I’m listening.”
Shirayuki’s plan is a simple one. Simple, and completely, utterly impossible.
Still, when you’ve got nothing left - when you’ve got nowhere left to go - you grasp onto what had previously been so out of reach. You clutch that to your chest and you hold on like it’s your only lifeline. Even when - especially when - it’s just a fairytale.
Shirayuki has an entire galaxy’s worth at her fingertips, and she grasps on to one. The end goal she tucks away deep into the recesses of her mind, hardly ever dares to think about it outright, lest the apprentice pluck it from her mind while it is pressed against his. When chasing an unknown destination with a broken compass, the end result doesn’t require much thought.
Just as long as she considers every possible hiding place. Every single one.
One standard cycle later - of one dusty Outer Rim planet after another, a colorful smear of strangers and half-answered questions - Shirayuki throws down a set of spades, and for reasons she can only blame on cabin fever, she fights back a laugh. “I’m not telling you anything.”
She really should just play with R-U, even though his programming could never let her win. However, she’s beginning to suspect that the apprentice simply carries a deck around in his robes at all times, at this point. He does prefer to be prepared.
“Why not?” It’s so close to a whine, there’s no way she can’t stare at him now. The apprentice is in a sleeveless shirt and is cross legged on the Unrepentant floor across from her. Wherever he is, he should be asleep. Not that he ever listens to her dismissive wheedling. The bond never holds for that long, anyway.
“Because you haven’t told me anything I don’t already know.”
His end of their deal is simple - when she tells him where she’s going, he will tell her everything.
He has, of course, refused to fill in any real blanks so far, and he curves a pleased grin every time she batters against the walls of his mind in a paroxysm of frustration. Yes, she could spill Resistance secrets whenever she very well felt like it - yes, she could side with the Sith and oppose the Republic - yes, she could be sold to the highest bidder and make some seedy being very wealthy indeed.
But there’s more to her own story, and they both know it. Why the entire galaxy is on her heels.
The apprentice is looking immensely pleased with himself; it’s the attention. He purrs like a loth cat under its ministrations. “I told you something. So now you owe me at least that.”
He tosses down hearts - she has to focus, but even gone from his gloved hand, she can still see the cards quite clearly resting on the ground in front of him, a piece of ground really lightyears away.
She tries not to think of that too much - the lonely ache that yawns inside her every time she does is often too much to bear.
“Fine.”
“So where are you headed, Miss?”
The age-old question is too close to becoming an endearment now for comfort. She draws, then sits back so she can rest against the wall. “Somewhere that doesn’t exist.”
The apprentice’s fingers falter over his fanned-out hand. He lifts his gaze, and amber eyes search hers, one at a time. He pulls a frown. “Now that’s just not fair.”
The word should be a slur on his lips. “You cheated right here in front of my own two eyes just two rounds ago!”
“And you could cheat right back, if you wanted.” His smile is so sly, his gaze on her so coy from beneath his lashes. “You could read my every move, Miss.”
A cold shiver slips down Shirayuki’s spine, and she draws her knees to her chest, letting her tabard fall between her legs. “I’m an herbalist, not -”
I’m not like you, she can’t say.
Yes you are, she hears, as though from a great distance off.
Mercifully, the apprentice breaks their eye contact. He slips two cards from his hand between two fingers. “Guess my move, Miss.”
Her lips twitch. “I will not.”
“Then credits are on the stakes next time.”
With the smallest reach, that other part of her ghosts against the edge of him - warmth, a restlessness over simmering flames that never cools. Right before he shoos her gently out, she catches - “Two Presidents.”
He lays down two threes.
“You see?” she says flatly, more than a little mortified. “Fake.”
The apprentice lifts an eyebrow. “Nonsense, Miss.” His teeth show. “I know your secret.”
Maybe it’s because she refuses to speak to him until he and his deck of cards both fade away to nothing once more, but she wins the next three rounds consecutively without trying, a private smile pulling constantly at the apprentice’s lips.
Two standard cycles after that, she’s weaving through knotted strands of green vines trailing from a vaulted ceiling to the floor, weighing them in her hands as she goes, her hood securely up and the cowl shielding most of her face. For having apparently grown in zero gravity - or so the vendor claims, all the better for unfettered development - they’re feeling remarkably normal of weight and texture, purplish veins brimming with a noxious, smoky substance that can cure most sentients living on dimmer Outer Rim planets of the common cold.
Maybe it’s because she’s so at peace, the light of binary suns filtering down to the clay floor and warming her down to her toes.
Maybe she’s simply too soft, in the end.
Her hands stroke a violet petal the size of her forearm and she finds there’s a second heart in her breast. It’s perhaps slightly to the right of hers, beating just out of sync.
She turns, and she simultaneously watches herself turn, sunlight draping golden rays over her gray cloak, lighting the wide white stripes on her face, making her green eyes shine - your heart soars -
Wait -
A blink, and it’s just him. Too much black for the loamy, sunlit greenhouse, his hands folded behind his back. The metal rod glints at his waist.
That feeling - however brief it had been - clings to her, and she stares into his face for a few seconds too long.
“The other day - you said you needed more snot garlic,” he supplies helpfully.
It’s the cold bucket of water to the face she needs. She tries not to roll her eyes. “It’s called Anzati -”
“Snot garlic.” He grins. “Show me when you find some, so I can go vomit in peace.”
He’s getting better at glimpsing her surroundings. She needs to be careful.
She needs to hurry.
A cycle later, she turns around, and Obi is seated at the workbench, as stiff as a board with his arms crossed in front of him, his hood pulled up. But he tilts his face up just enough so he can see her - and barely holds in a snigger.
“What’s so funny?”
Instead of answering her aloud, his voice fills her head. You’re standing in the middle of the council of war. In your PJ’s. He bites his lip so hard she wonders if he’ll bleed. You’d better not make me laugh.
Two cycles after that, she opens the ‘fresher door and he is inside of it, sleeves rolled up, sitting right over the drain, ankles crossed and spilling out onto the metal floor, a holopad glowing blue in his lap -
She clutches her towel to her skinny frame, and shrieks.
Right before the bond screeches shut, she sees the tops of his cheekbones stained a deep, incriminating red.
Two cycles after that, the snow-white pads of her pale fingers are stroking a Twi’lek child’s arm. She means to comfort her, try to gentle away some of the endearing tears trickling down her lovely cobalt face.
One more pass of her hand, and the gash in the child’s bicep has closed up without any warning. Shirayuki gapes at the newly-healed skin, aghast.
“How do you do it?” flutters the mother. The child is too surprised to speak, or to even cry anymore. “Surely you must possess some witch’s magic.”
She’s panicking. “Oh, no.” And yet Shirayuki smiles easily. “Merely a poultice on my hands -”
“Good,” says the apprentice, pacing between them, looking from her face to the grateful Twi’lek’s. “It’s better if they don’t know what you can do.”
I know your secret, he had teased so long ago. Now, his face is darker. His gaze is hungrier.
And she is losing control.
For just a second, she knows neither him, nor herself.
One cycle after that, she falls to her knees in the belly of the Unrepentant, clutching her head in her hands.
You’re screaming - you’re clawing your way - and you beg, and you beg -
Something heavy knocks into her hip over and over, then finally - bangs into her shoulder.
She gasps, and with a titanic effort, manages to raise her head at last. R-U is rocking at her side, clucking worriedly.
“R-U, I -”
It’s tearing through her again, it’s tearing through you, light, burning, over and over -
She leaps to her feet and she’s sprinting through the Unrepentant, banging off walls, barely catching herself on the blast doors, as someone is reeling in her insides bit by bit like fishing line, tearing them from her, her skin is flaying, she can barely feel her own weight on her feet -
Without needing to think, without needing to look, she knows where to go.
She crashes into the cabin whitefaced and nauseous with misery. The apprentice is sitting on the edge of her bunk in nothing but pants, almost all of his skin mottled or marred by pale crisscrossing lines, his face in his arms while his entire body trembles with her agony.
Not hers. His own. Or maybe, they’re one and the same now.
There is a darkness in this room, a darkness coiling inside of her and muffling all her senses. She approaches him numbly while he shivers and shakes and whispers to himself terrible things, things in a language she has never heard but somehow understands snatches of. Power, victory, blood, and suffering will be your teacher -
And the girl’s -
Shirayuki collapses to her knees on the ground in front of him. “Open your eyes!” she cries. “Wake up! It’s me!”
The muscles in his bare sweat-sheened arms tighten. He coils in tighter on himself, and a fresh wave of horror rocks through them both.
“It hurts,” she practically sobs, or were those his words, and not hers? “Don’t listen to it. Don’t -”
And then -
From the back of her mind, she dredges up a memory.
Apprentice? he snorts. You know my name.
I don’t, actually.
Miss. I learned a long time ago not to underestimate you.
Shouldn’t you be Darth… something-or-other….
Please. He’d smirked. I have some self-respect -
“Obi,” she groans, and it takes everything she has, every last scrap of power that’s within her, to shove eleven months of shyly peeking into one another’s souls and the months of glimpses on farflung planets before that, eleven months of a Sith and a wanted herbalist warily pacing in ever-tightening concentric circles as they are caught up in the whills of the Force, playing cards, naming the star systems out the viewport, plotting and tricking and trusting one another, at the deep and yawning chasm opening up inside them both.
“You know me,” she whispers, and her voice cracks. She wants to grab his face, make him lift his head and look at her. But they would pass through one another uselessly like ghosts. “Come back. Please.”
At last - Obi raises his head from his arms. His familiar face is tortured, a stranger’s mask.
“Don’t,” he snarls.
The bond slams shut. Obi disappears. Shirayuki falls backwards off her knees, hunched on the floor of her own cabin and shivering. For a long time, she doesn’t have the strength to get back up.
A mere two days after that, Shirayuki starts to lose herself.
“It’s time for you to come with me,” says Obi once he’s materialized behind the copilot’s chair. “You’ve waited far too long.”
“You leave me alone,” she hisses, and stalks from the cockpit. From across the stars, Obi-who-is-no-longer-Obi follows close behind her, his boots loud and echoing on the metal floor of some other starship.
“You have no time left,” he insists. She wrenches around a corner and he stubbornly follows. “Either tell me where you are and let me come find you, or suffer unnecessarily.”
“I’d say I am suffering unnecessarily,” she mutters. A stab of guilt whips through her gut. When had her insides turned so sour?
“You’re a Togruta. It’s common for your kind to be strong with the Force. But you’ve been holding in your power for so long -”
“I’m not what you think I am -”
“Tell me where you are!”
Shirayuki turns to face him at last, towards the voice that has never, not once, raised itself in her direction. His fists are clenched and his eyes are such a bright, unnerving yellow. The bond is pulsing with tension, fraying at the edges. “You’re flying toward something ancient. Something sacred. It’s why you’re losing more and more control every day - your powers are clawing their way out of you. I can feel it.”
Her eyes narrow. “I didn’t think there was anything sacred to Darksiders.”
Obi’s mouth pulls into a languid smirk, so little like his, her skin crawls. “Even hell is sacred to demons, Miss.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Come with me. I’ll protect you.” He swallows, and it’s a zing of the familiar piercing through the mess they had always been destined to become. “You can train - learn. You can go home to your senator. He’ll welcome you back with open arms.”
That’s it.
“Let Obi go, and let him tell me that himself,” she snaps.
It was as Zen had always warned her in those low tones, as the war had deepened, festering in the cracks of their lives. For there to be an apprentice, there must also be a master.
Obi’s face twists in confusion. “I’m right here, aren’t I?”
It’s the last thing he says before, with a terrible sound caught between a growl and a sob, Shirayuki does something she has never been able to do before. She shoves him out, and the span of limitless space, dust and stars and all the nothing in between, comes crashing down between them once more.
Shirayuki is alone. The bond does not open again.
One final cycle passes.
On a distant planet orbiting the last red giant before wild space begins, before the great, untouched expanse of the Beyond stretches - nestled in the mountainous jungle, in an abandoned hut, in the depths of a soft nest of blankets - Shirayuki wakes up screaming.
Her Ama and Ada want to show her a supernova.
Her bracelets are tinkling together, the adornment about her montrals shining in the almost nonexistent starlight. The moons have set - it’s almost time.
“Get ready,” whispers Ada, and she is sitting on his shoulders, her little legs clamping around his neck in excitement. He chuckles, and Ama holds her hand, and -
Something winks into existence. A tiny pinprick of light.
Shirayuki deflates. “That’s it?”
Ama’s laughter is joyous, full of melody. “Darling. You think just because it’s far away, and happened so long ago - that it’s such a small thing?”
Ama’s smiling face - Ada’s bold blue mantrals - the velvet night sky overhead - the purple mountains, the savannah stretching on to the horizon - it all splinters like a holoscreen thrown against a wall.
Then, in a hurricane of light and sound, it explodes.
The walls of the hut shake. Every last object within not somehow bolted down or rooted in the earth rises into the air, circling, whirling in a vortex of mess and chaos. The roof peels away. The closest trees uproot. Dust, sand, rocks, bits of water join the fray, an earth-darkened cyclone nestled in the mountain, under the stars.
Shirayuki sees Shili. Ama and Ada. Their graves, nestled in the long grass of the savannah. The slaver ship comes and she raises her hand fruitlessly, to call out, run, run faster -
Wounds healing slowly under the mere touch of her hands. Slipping onto the Unrepentant, R-U at her side, helping her fly. Zen, his beautiful smile, the shy touch of lips, the crushing and safe circle of Mitsuhide’s arms, Kiki listening in her downtime while Shirayuki jabbers away -
She sees Obi for the first time, again, on white parapets, his robes billowing out behind him in the breeze.
Obediently descending to life in the Resistance bunker. How it had felt so familiar, because she had already known what the inside of a cage feels like.
Her plan. The plan she had buried down so deep.
Her eyes open, and she is staring into Obi’s terrified face.
“That’s what you want,” he says softly. His lips twitch, boyish. Himself. Sound has reduced to just the concussions of her own heartbeat in her ears and Obi’s voice, unaffected by the deluge tornadoing all around them, whipping her clothes against her limp body, but not his. “You want to go to Lyrias. That’s just a fairytale, Miss.”
She can’t answer him - her will is not her own. Something else, something far greater and far more ancient, has swallowed it whole. But tears still gather in her eyes. The sting reminds her that this is real - she is still herself, she is still here.
Obi’s breath hitches - she’s never heard that before, never been close enough, but now he’s close enough to touch, if she just stretched out her arm far enough.
“You want the war to end,” he’s saying. His eyes are so wide, and she knows that he’s seeing what she’s seeing, that all of her has poured into the Force for anyone with half a mind to see. “And you want -”
He chokes.
“You think you can stop my master. You think you have a plan.”
Anything else he says is drowned out in another blast of energy, emanating from nowhere, sending shockwaves to all of her, every last particle of her, and her cowl whips out behind her, floating in the air above them like a sail. Her feet are on solid ground, but she may as well have been hovering in the vacuum of space, torn apart by a thousand crashing meteors for all the control she has. She has never destroyed a thing in her life.
She’s scared.
A sob escapes her, and for an awful moment, she thinks it might have been those very words -
And then Obi steps closer, and for the first time ever, gloved hands untouched by flying debris and not as swathed in the nighttime as they should be, he reaches across the unseen void to touch her. Both his hands fly to her face.
And make contact.
The shock of his touch against her skin, on her cheeks and jaw, is enough to almost throw her from the grip of the Force entirely, almost enough to send the whirlwind of flying debris crashing back down all around them. But it isn’t, and it doesn’t, and Obi cradles her face while his frightened expression becomes instead determined, and he holds her gaze as if it may as well be the last thing he ever does.
“Look at me,” he says firmly. Then, gentle: “Look only at me.”
She does, she is, and as Obi gathers her closer, so close he’s all she can see, so close he nearly wraps his arms all the way around her, even though he is unthinkably out of reach, even though he is so far away the solidness of his touch may as well just be a pinprick, some sense of reality returns to her. Something inside her roots anchors in the earth.
Peace that is not her own is driving forward through her tumult. Obi’s eyes close, and the bond hums like a wild thing, pushing away all else. “Just hold on a little longer,” he’s saying. “I’ve got you.”